2012 Articles

The Finescale Response of Lowered ADCP Velocity Measurements Processed with Different Methods

Thurnherr, Andreas M.

In a paper published in 2002 in this journal, K. Polzin et al. derive corrections for spectra of vertical shear calculated from lowered acoustic Doppler current profiler (LADCP) velocity data. To illustrate and validate the corrections, they use velocities derived with a specific implementation of the shear method for LADCP processing that is no longer supported or widely used. In several recent publications, spectral corrections specific to this old processing method have been applied without modification to LADCP data processed with the more modern and much more widely used velocity-inversion method, which is associated with significantly less damping at high vertical wavenumbers than the older method. The purpose of this work is to derive and validate spectral corrections appropriate for different LADCP processing methods.